Travel

If you’re like many people you go online to find information on how to do things. However, we found a lot of outdated information on how to apply for temporary residency in Mexico so I thought I would share our process of getting a Temporary Residency Card. This is for those Americans who intend to live in Mexico (for non-lucrative purposes) and obtain a temporary residency card for the first time. This is what we did: First I emailed the…

On our road trip over to the East Cape in Baja, we also went to visit the waterfall at Santiago. Bajainsider says, “Santiago is a small pueblo located 46 km north of the, Los Cabos Airport (SJD), San Jose Del Cabo, Baja Sur. At about 42km you make a left turn off Highway 1 to Santiago…” Follow the signs (or ask someone like we did) to a rancho officially called the Rancho Ecológico Sol de Mayo. There will be a…

We’re in Todos Santos in Baja, Mexico! Yay! So how does one move to Mexico for part of the year and the States for part of the year? People do. We are one of them. Here’s a few photos and our story in a nutshell. If you have any questions, shoot me an email. First you have to make the decision to just “do it.” It helps if you have some way of making a living while you are out…

Here’s our plan – we want to move our home to Mexico for the winter and Washington in the summer. We want to be closer to family and friends near Seattle and Camano Island. So we traveled up to Washington to check out the communities between Camano Island and Bellingham to see where we might want to purchase property. We were gone for about 3 weeks. We did some camping and visited family and friends along the way. Here are…

In recalling our recent trip through Mexico and Ecuador, I’m finding that my thoughts keep going back to Sayulita. It is one of my favorite spots from our travels. There is a lot to love about Sayulita Mexico. It has a cool main square. Lots of beautiful art. Great views for enjoying a margarita and a marvelous meal. Heard some rockin’ good music at Bar Don Pato. Found some happenin’ cool bars Met some nice people and had a lot…

We landed in Ecuador about 13 days ago. We took a bus ride from Guayaquil to Montanita and stayed in a small town nearby call Manglaralto. We stayed in a cool cabin on the property of Mercedes and George. They run an eco-lodge called La Factoría which is a center for the development of contemporary craft and design, and also offers eco-training programs. We enjoyed breakfast each morning with them which included locally sourced eggs, cheese, bread, honey, yogurt, and…

This is post 8 in my 10 post blog series on Beth Kempton’s PDF titled “Zen and the Art of Doing what you Love.” The Steps and journal prompts are taken from Beth’s PDF. STEP 8: TRAVEL LIGHT Journal prompt: What could be possible if you just tuned out the negativity and followed your heart? This is an appropriate journal prompt because although Beth is talking about emotions and getting rid of negativity, the shoulds and should nots and following…

Our last trip to Baja was in July. We had an awesome time. Here is another post about our trip. When we’re in Baja, just about every evening we either go to the beach or go up to the upstairs patio to enjoy the sunset. We always are in awe of the beauty! If we’re lucky, we can see the spot of green glow that the sun makes right before it goes down over the horizon. We pause and wonder…

This is the last post about our road trip down to Todos Santos in Baja Mexico from Prescott, AZ. We headed out of San Carlos to the Topolobampo ferry and got there 3 hours ahead of time, as the bajaferries.com website suggested. If we knew the ferry was going to leave at 8 pm instead of 5 pm, we might not have rushed to get there! We got our ferry ticket and walked the dogs and gave them water before we got…

Here’s a little video of me in the studio and then the continuing story of our trip to Todos Santos, Baja, Mexico. After we got our auto import permit for our truck outside of Nogales we were on our way to San Carlos where we were going to spend the night. It’s a pretty uneventful drive. Straight roads almost the whole way so that it feels like you’re just driving and driving and driving and the landscape is pretty…

We’re driving to Todos Santos, Baja, Mexico again. This time we’re taking a new route. My truck isn’t packed to the gills yet but it will be soon! Greg is building stuff and getting things ready. Cody can’t wait. Here’s our route. Stay tuned for more.

We’ve spent the last few weeks packing up our house and getting ready to move to some temporary housing before we head to Prescott, Arizona. We had a little going away party at our house to say “bye” to a few friends and celebrate being together one last time out on the back porch which is a great place for having a party! It was a gorgeous day and a great get together! And then it was time to get…

We made it to Todos Santos, Baja California, Mexico. Our trip odometer just turned over to 3,000 when we pulled into town. Wow, a 3,000 mile road trip. We thought that was pretty cool. I’ve made previous blog posts about traveling down Baja before so this time I will just blog about a few highlights from our road trip. We wanted to explore a new beach on this trip so we chose Bahia San Basilia which is located on the…

Detail from Little Blue Beach Shack painting We’re taking a roadtrip and driving to Todos Santos again. It will be the third time we’ve made this drive! We are so looking forward to getting into some sunshine! I’ll be creating paintings and making some art videos while we are there. We’ll stay for a couple months so there should be plenty of time for both. I hope. I was just backing up my computer and sorting through some files as…

Hi, I’ve been taking a little vacation in Seattle to celebrate my birthday. It’s been a week of celebration. It’s been really terrific. We spent some time at the beach on Camano Island. It’s been raining but it’s still been great! We’ve been sitting by the wood stove, reading, listening to the rain. We took long beach walks. We collected cool, patterned wood. And colorful rocks. And admired what the neighbors did with their collected beach rocks. So pretty in the…

My newest Peace Tree painting is titled “A Peace Tree Gathering“. I like the way the trees have their arms around each other. They are standing in community. The painting wraps around all the sides, top and bottom. I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the cool things I like about aspens are that they share a root system deep under ground. I like what I read on Wikipedia about them. There it says, “Each individual tree can live for…

I love hiking in the outdoors. No matter the season, it’s all good to me! What’s interesting about Bend is the diversity of temperature and weather because of the elevation gains throughout the area. Just a couple miles from our house the elevation rises and it is much colder and hence much snowier just south of us. Yesterday we decided to go hike Lava Butte which is in this area. It ‘s a short drive and a fav, easy hike. It…

Never doubt the impossible. Halleluja! I found our lost photos on our new camera! They’re some of my fav pics from our trip so when I thought they were deleted I was pretty bummed. They’re from when we visited Kristen in Provo on our recent road trip. See my previous blog post about losing the photos. There was a folder on our camera called private1 and that’s where they were hidden. How I found them is a miracle. Truly. I really…

Here are some more photos from our 3 week road trip to the Southwest in October. After we went to Santa Fe and Taos we headed to Heron Lake to get our kayaks in the water. Heron Lake is a beautiful lake in the desert in Northern New Mexico. There are some remote camp spots along the edge. So we headed in that direction. We each had a dog on the back of our kayaks. The dogs sit on a…

We toured the Earthship homes on our way to Santa Fe. Earthships are off the grid homes which are built with recycled materials using earth filled tires, bottles and cans. We found them fascinating so we visited a community center where you can learn about how they’re made. Visit http://www.earthship.com for more info on them. There was a fully sustainable Earthship home being built nearby that we toured. I liked the arches and the use of bottles to make a stained…

When we neared Taos we took a break and had lunch. When we stopped, I kept seeing lovely green rocks on the ground so I started a collection. We also stopped and took a walk along a path which led to this church. There was a gorgeous view of the surrounding area from the top of this butte that the church stood on. We stopped and took some pics of these wild horses out in the brush too. Finally we…

We’re a bit sorry we didn’t take Kristen’s advice and travel south east along Colorado’s lower half to travel across Colorado. She told us it was a beautiful route. And we would find this out on our way back. But going, we didn’t do it, instead we decided to take the Central route. But first we stopped in Telluride to check out this quaint mountain town before we headed East. We grabbed a coffee and walked around, checking out the…

We loved Moab. It’s home to Arches National Park. A beautiful area with towering spires, big canyons and magnificent arches! I loved seeing these huge, expansive arches! And in Moab we found a cool camp spot near Slick Rock with an awesome view! Check out the beautiful fluffy clouds below. We had gorgeous weather. The landscape makes me want to paint it! I’ve only painted a few landscapes before. One of them was my “Superstition Mountains” painting from 2006. See…

My show at the Tumalo Art Co. is coming to an end this Tuesday. It’s been a great show! And Opening Night was so fun. Here I am with my friends Sandy and Wes. I talked with lots of people about my art that night. I was very grateful to be showing with Dorothy Freudenberg. I love Dorothy’s art and her work goes well with mine with vibrant reds and oranges. And then we came home and started packing for…